Similar to the recent outage of October 2025,  a massive outage on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing network brought a significant portion of the internet to a standstill in December 2021,. The disruption originated when an Amazon employee in Virginia attempted to add capacity to the main network, an action which inadvertently caused a system failure. The incident, which lasted for most of a workday, served as a real-world example of the cascading effects that can occur when a single technology provider experiences a problem.

Widespread Disruption Across the Internet

The December 2021 incident had an impact of the AWS failure was immediate and far-reaching. Numerous high-profile services that rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure went dark for users around the world. Affected companies and platforms included streaming giants Disney+ and Netflix, communication tool Slack, and major services like Ticketmaster, the trading app Robinhood, and even the Associated Press news agency. The outage was not limited to digital services; it also crippled Amazon’s own physical logistics network. The company’s delivery operations were grounded, and chaos ensued in its warehouses as the systems they depend on became unavailable.

A Single Point of Failure

The event highlighted the market concentration in the cloud computing sector. Amazon Web Services controls approximately one-third of the entire cloud computing market, making its infrastructure critical to the daily operations of millions of businesses. This level of market dominance means a single failure point can have an outsized impact on the broader economy. Vass Bednar, executive director of the master of public policy in digital society program at McMaster University, commented on this concentration, stating, “They’re just so big and so sprawling that there’s this weird sense of resignation that it is a single point of failure.” The 2021 outage demonstrated precisely what happens when that single point fails.